about manda beeching

I was born and brought up in the New Forest in the south of England.
After completing an art foundation course I left formal education to follow my own path and over the years my love of colour and texture has found its expression in textiles and painting and now increasingly in printmaking and collage.

I have always lived in very rural locations and the wild countryside on my doorstep and the flora and fauna that live within it are constant themes in my creative output. My experiences of travelling through southern Europe and Morocco also continue to inspire me as does the work of artists such as Barbara Rae, Mary Fedden and Elaine Pamphilon.
I have exhibited and sold my work in the UK, Spain and Portugal and many of my linocut designs are now reproduced as greetings cards by The Eco-friendly Card Company.

painting

In my studio I use the drawings and colour studies that I make on location to produce work that combines elements of abstraction and representation. For me capturing the essence of the subject matter is more interesting than producing a literal interpretation.
I am happy working either on paper or gessoed board using acrylic paint and other mixed media, building layers that I can work back into to create colourful and expressive paintings.

print making

I really enjoy the processes involved in printmaking and working with lino allows me to express my ideas in a much more graphic and illustrative way.

Recently I have been exploring monoprinting with a gelliplate using my own stencils and plants from the garden. The unpredictable results mean that I have plenty of interesting printed material that I can repurpose and combine with painted papers and reject linocuts to make original collage pieces, examples of which can be viewed in the Printmaking gallery.